Great Chess - Indian / Turkish variant

In an 18th century Indian manuscript, this game is described. The game
is mentioned by several authors. Murray
describes the game, mentioning its Indian source. Gollon
bases his description of the game on Murray, but calls the game Turkish
Great Chess. Schmittberger
also describes the game briefly in his book.

Most authors agree: this is one of the nicest variants of great chess.
I agree with them: the game is nice and interesting, with probably as largest
disadvantage the slowness of pawns.

The real age of the game is somewhat hard to estimate, but given the
modern type of moves of several pieces, its date of birth should probably
placed after the middle ages.

The board

The game is played on a ten by ten board (uncheckered?). The opening
setup is as follows:

Movement of pieces

Rook, knight, bishop, queen, and king move like in usual
chess. (Actually, some of these pieces were called different in the original
game, e.g., the queen was a general, the bishop an elephant.)

The giraffe is a powerful piece: it has the combined moves of
queen and knight, i.e., of rook, knight and bishop.

The vizir has the combined moves of bishop and knight.

The war machine (dabbabah) has the combined moves of rook and
knight.

Pawns move as usual pawns, but have no initial double step. When reaching
the last row, pawns promote to queens.

Other rules

The player who mates his opponent wins the game. The rules about stalemate
are unknown; play e.g. as in orthodox chess. Castling is not possible in this
game.

Modern variant

Eric Greenwood suggests to speed up this game, by allowing pawns (except the
pawns on e- and f-columns) an initial double step on their first or second
move (but not both). The pawns on the e- and f-columns can make a double step
on their first move. This means effectively that a pawn can make a double step
when on the second or third row (counted from the side of the player owning
the pawn). They can be captured en-passant when making a double step.

Eric Greenwood also suggests to allow castling: the king is moved three
squares towards the rook, and the rook jumps over the king to the next
square.

Written by Hans Bodlaender. With thanks to David Paulowich for noting an
error, and to Eric Greenwood for the variant suggestions.
WWW page created: 1995. Last modified: October 30, 1997.
﻿

In Tamerlane chess piece, named giraffe is presented among military forces, like elephants, cavalry, camelry and war machines (dababahs). Here is giraffe as well, and here it's the strongest piece. But why? Was giraffes historicaly used for military purposes? Or it's merely imitating of giraffe hunt (with opponent controlling your prey)?
Of course, no question about Grande Acedrex, where most of pieces are named after exotic animals.

This game uses an unusual initial setup to achieve a better result than The Sultan's Game, an 11x11 chess variant invented by L. Tressan in 1840. I tried replacing the Queen + Knight compound with the somewhat weaker Bishop + Nightrider compound in Unicorn Great Chess in 2001.

Excellent rating for a game this old, of course Christian Freeling's Grand Chess has set a new standard for chess on the 10x10 board.